Okay, so there's nothing new here, or particularly original, but from the get go at least there are characters on display and they are behaving believably. Makes you a little more vested in the situation as it unfolds. I don't know that the flashback structure of it helped any, but what most folks want to know is "was it scary?" or "was it stupid?" For my tastes it was involving enough, with a few creepy vibes but nothing really exceptional. I could have done without the lazy go to of repeated nightmares in order to have something unnerving happen. Make the shocks part of the story! Make them part of the situation! We lose investment if we expect every unusual occurrence to just be a harmless dream. But that being said, at least it wasn't stupid the rest of the time and I never had the urge to fast forward thru it. Entirely acceptable. But I doubt I'll ever watch it again. There needs to be an option with the streaming services between "liked" and "disliked".

MARY is another addition to the popular genre of seafaring horror, this time around telling a haunted house story (complete with female ghost rendered via CGI jump scares) aboard a yacht. It's cheaply made and cheaply directed, relying on obvious scares rather than much in the way of subtlety or atmosphere building. The only thing to distinguish it from at least a dozen others is the cast, with two Hollywood stars in the shape of Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer playing the main couple. They deserve better material, because they can bring nothing to their cliched characters.

There is a back story about a witch drowned at sea and separated from her children. A cursed, or haunted boat named "Mary" is found floating and abandoned. David Greer (Gary Oldman) obtains the boat and takes his family out for a leisurely cruise. The plot is told as a flashback by his wife Sarah (Emily Mortimer) who was discovered floating on debris at sea.

Many of the horror scenes were filmed at night in the rain with little lighting. It was difficult to see what was going on. Many more scenes happened off-camera. The scare effect wasn't good and the family issues were too minor to care about: teen angst and a fling.

Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.